In Case of Emergency, Release Raptor

It's been quite a saga, if you've followed along all this time. All that extra time paid off!

At this point we have what fans have nearly-universally hailed as a worthy successor to the original classic. We still have plenty more to do prior to 1.0 in Q2 of 2019, but the game is ready to play now and we hope you'll come enjoy it and give us further feedback.

Pick up the game now for 10% off!

New To AI War?

The original AI War is widely considered one of the top strategy games of all time, with a central mechanic that no other title has replicated.

Humanity has already lost the war, and now you command the last remnants in a desperate campaign to take back the galaxy.

More than most strategy games, your actions have consequences: taking every minor outpost you see is a surefire way to alert the enemy and spell your own doom.

Strike smart, capture new technology, and bring down a foe that overmatches you in every way.

What's New In 2?

The sequel improves the UI, the graphics, the audio, and many of the core mechanics. It's an across-the-board upgrade.

But even more than that, it brings in new friends and foes alike -- large factions are now possible, with their own sophisticated AI, economies, and rules.

Marauders are now able to conquer territory, and build up their own bases if left un-checked. The nanocaust feeds on the strength of those around it, while the macrophage happily grows in the background, sending out spores...

Enjoy the classic human vs AI cage match, or expand to a much wider living galaxy.

25% off Loyalty Coupon!

If you own the original AI War, or The Last Federation, or Bionic Dues -- check your inventory on Steam! You may need to restart it, or log out and back in. Inside, you'll find a coupon for 25% off on top of the launch 10% discount. Both are only valid this week, so hopefully this isn't sitting in your inbox too long!

In Case of Emergency, Release Raptor

1

126

Release Raptor is now free, and freely refund-available.

29 Ağu 2016

Okay, wow. It's been a busy couple of days figuring some things out. Thanks for your patience during this time. Things are slightly different than I had expected, but the current setup should let people get the exact result they want.

You will need to request the refund yourself, though, which is different from what I originally said -- I do apologize about that, but see below for the skinny on why that is.

Quick History

First up we had the announcement that In Case of Emergency, Release Raptor was being pulled from Early Access and everyone would be refunded.

To clarify some points, I explained further why it was not crazy for us to pull it so early.

Then we had a snafu based on the fact that I did this late on a Friday, so the game was able to remain up and available for several days.

Suddenly a bunch of people wanted the game, either for free (aka paying for it and then getting a refund) or with us actually getting the money for it. And other people asking not to be refunded.

We had a bajillion questions, and I answered those in one central thread that people could easily peruse.

I was mean and showed people what might have been with regard to some of the robots.

Finally today I was able to have full conversations with Valve and Humble, we got things taken down, and I finally have some concrete answers for you on exactly what is planned next. Valve had some great suggestions based around the multitude of various requests that people have had during this period. I wasn't sure exactly what to do, so I was very glad for the guidance there.

The Plan: Short-Term

In Case of Emergency, Release Raptor has been taken out of Early Access and out of paid status and is now a simple free 2 play game on Steam. This is provided AS-IS, with no support, simply because folks wanted it.

Unlike most F2P games, this has no form of monetization at all. Various people wanted to play the game, and we spent a lot of time making it, so this was better than just taking it off the face of the earth. This was a really good suggestion from Valve, I thought.

Since there are such varying degrees of desire from folks on whether or not they want a refund, we're making this a process you can control. If you want a refund, just go through the normal refund process and it will accept your request for a refund regardless of playtime or purchase date.

A Point Of Clarification

If you take the refund option, the game will be removed from your account. However, given that the game is now Free 2 Play, you can just install it again directly. If you ever uninstall it again it will again disappear from your account when it is in F2P status, though.

If you have the game and did not refund it, it stays in your account and will count toward your total number of games. If you have it via the F2P form, it won't count toward your number of games.

This is... unintended on my part. However, it's how F2P games work on Steam, and this is definitely better than nobody having access to it. We're not ever going to take this game out of free status, so there's no real worry if you don't have access to the game in your account while it is not installed. It will still be there when you get back.

Also, protip: this game is not linked to Steam in any way, so you can just copy the contents of the game folder onto a thumb drive if you're worried about losing it. Burn it to a DVD if you like. Easy peasy!

The Plan: Long Term

I hope that in some future year that this game becomes viable. If that's the case, then we will likely start working on this again under the banner of In Case of Emergency, Release Raptor 2.

In other words, that new project would not affect this one, and this one would stay free and untouched. Essentially I guess you could consider this one a demo for the theoretical sequel that we would potentially do a year, two, or three from now.

A sequel is in no way being announced, and I have no immediate plans to work on one. It's something I would like to do, but that's about it.

Should You Request A Refund?

If you want one, then absolutely: yes! I don't want to take your money if you don't want to give it to us. If you like the game and want us to keep the $4.50 or so you spent on it, then we're obviously grateful. But please in no way feel guilted into it or anything like that.

If you get the F2P version of the game and want to throw some change our way, we do have a tip jar[arcengames.com], but we'd be just as happy to see you try out one of our other titles.

Possible Monetization?

I created some trading cards for the game, and they look really cool I think, but games with absolutely no monetization cannot have them. Some folks have suggested that they want a hat or something anyhow, so I guess we could do something like provide one or two of those at the minimum possible price. Then the trading cards could come out, and so on.

I'm a little wary of doing that, though, because then I feel like that creates some degree of obligation for support. For now, I've included the images for some of the cards in this post.

What's Next?

We're going to be putting all our efforts into AI War 2: Rise from Ashes, which will be a kickstarter project that then comes over to Steam. If you want to be emailed about that when the time comes, then feel free to email us at arcengames at gmail dot com noting that you'd like to get a notice when that project goes live.

Thank you very much to everyone for your support (of so many kinds) during this trying time. It means a lot to myself and the rest of the team.

Best,Chris

In Case of Emergency, Release Raptor

45

52

Time for some straight talk: Release Raptor is being pulled and refunded.

26 Ağu 2016

First up: as promised, Alpha 16[arcengames.com] is now out. This includes fixes, improved and extended AI, a new robot, and a minimap.

In A Nutshell, What's Up?

I'm going to give all the customers of In Case of Emergency, Release Raptor a full refund and let them keep the game, then take the game off sale. The game is selling extremely poorly, even below what happened with Starward Rogue.

Isn't Part Of Early Access "Don't Make A Game You Rely On EA Sales For?"

Yes, this is very true. However, I stated upfront that our reason for doing EA with this game was partly as a market survey of sorts. I felt like that would be a way of determining how big this game could get. With Starward Rogue, and indeed some of our other past commercial failures, we put in everything and the kitchen sink and then there wasn't a market there.

I never expected that one option even on the table with this one would be "actually don't do it at all," because the premise is incredibly exciting to me and seemed like something other people would also be very interested in. But just from the concept alone, we have a lot of pushback from press; and despite some quite positive coverage from some reasonably biggish youtubers, that isn't moving the needle at all.

We don't need Release Raptor to be our sole source of income, or even our largest one. However, if it's going to be our largest expense it also has to vaguely earn its keep or at least show the promise that it will someday do so. That's what is missing here.

Why Not Just Build Out A Stripped-Down Version 1.0 That Is Worth $5?

I honestly don't think there's any way that a lot of people wouldn't be left grumbling at that. I personally will also lose far more money trying to do that than I already am, and probably some of what little staff we have left would have to be released. It's just far, far too risky. I'd rather be known for honorably pulling a game than slapping a 1.0 sticker on something -- whether or not that experience is worth $5 or not, we both know the perception would be there.

So Are You Untrustworthy, Or What?

The immediate idea is probably to think "wow they delayed it a ton and then are possibly canceling it right after it comes into EA?"

My response to that is that this is exactly how you want a game company to comport itself. I held back the game while I didn't feel like there was enough there for other people to catch the vision I have for what it would turn into. I'm not going to take anybody's money and run; in fact, I'm going to eat a big fat loss out of it and you get a free game if you bought it.

You can certainly argue that I have overreached or have at least misjudged the market in several instances, but I'm not going to sell you a turd and call it ice cream.

Is Release Raptor A Bad Game?

I certainly don't think so, in any form. I play it, and it gives me a feeling of joy. I just love going through and doing things with the raptor. It has an elemental fun factor to it that myself and a number of other people have reacted well to. I thought that it would be enough to provide this, and then the promise of more enemies and tactics and whatnot (sheesh that's what we're known for, people ought to have some faith in THAT bit if nothing else).

That said, people have different degrees of warm feelings toward the controls. That doesn't help. People have different reactions to the environments. Etc.

Was This Just Youtuber Bait?

No. This is a project that I freaking love, and that is based around my favorite animal (velociraptors). It's something I very, very much wanted to see happen.

That said, I won't deny that the idea of a game that appealed to a larger audience and more easily picked up video views was an attractive one. I even considered calling this "Raptor Simulator," to the dismay of my staff.

This was never intended to be like Goat Simulator (which I've never played, but my understanding is that it's a silly bug-fest just centered around messing about and not doing anything). I figured we might be able to pick up some of the Goat Simulator crowd since you CAN come in here and just mess about, but what I didn't realize was that this would create a stigma that would lead people to then to think it's more vapid than it is.

Which, launching with less content in terms of enemies and tactical situations than I would like, only reinforced that perception I suppose. "There's not enough to do" is probably the number one complaint, and I thought I had made that clear enough from the start. And we've been managing daily updates with substantial new content, which I think is pretty darn impressive.

Then plan was to put out more content in a month than most other EA games put out in a year, and just keep on trucking with it. We've done it before with other games, multiple times, and it's something we were well geared-up to do this time, too.

What Went Wrong?

I... am not entirely sure, honestly. People's perception of this was not matching up to what it was, partly. Also I suppose I should have made more grandiose claims and been mysterious and vague instead of transparent and clear. It's way more exciting when you don't know what's going on and "it could be anything -- it could be EVERYTHING!!"

I'm all for enthusiasm, but hype is not something I really like. We had a lot of hype for A Valley Without Wind, and that burned the company and myself in some fairly profound ways. So I'm really wary of hype; that was our one game that had it, and it was distinctly unpleasant. Well, okay: I guess there's also hype around Stars Beyond Reach at the moment, which is another project of ours that I refuse to release yet because I don't think it's good enough yet.

Ultimately I don't think it can be blamed on any one thing. I do know that in the past -- going back to 2014 with the release of The Last Federation, and then everything before it -- we made almost all of our sales via Steam and people finding our stuff on Steam. We'd see a bump in sales for a few hours after a Kotaku piece or a Total Biscuit video, and literally no other website or youtuber made any bump that we could discern.

Being on the front page of Steam was the big thing. We've had one title in the past that have reached the #6 top seller spot on Steam as a whole (IIRC it was The Last Federation), and multiple titles that have hit the top 10 sellers on Steam as a whole (even A Valley Without Wind).

It used to be super concerning if we weren't in the top 20 bestsellers on Steam for at least a day or two, and when we dropped down into the 60s on overall game sales it was basically game over until the next discount promotion. Discount promotions, even as recently as 2015, had more weight behind them, too. The lack of gamification of recent seasonal sales has been bad for the small developers, in my opinion.

Overall the market is more crowded now, and gaining visibility is harder. We tried advertising this time, but we literally spent more money today on advertising than the game made. Win!! So this is some sort of New Market now, anyhow, with something approaching the App Store effect that we've seen on Apple devices. I was incredibly paranoid that would happen going all the way back to 2009, and then I gradually got less worried about it, and now here we are. How many indie developers do you know of who have made more than one or two games at this point? That's a bit scary to think about.

It's not all doom and gloom in the market, obviously: in some ways, opportunities are larger now than they ever were. And it's certainly a better market now than in mid-2009 when I first started out with AI War. So it's certainly not all market forces, and I don't mean to imply that.

At the end of the day, for whatever combination of reasons, this doesn't seem to be the right game at the right time. Might we pick this project back up in the future? I'd like to think so. As I said, this is a personal passion of mine (raptors), not some Goat Simulator knockoff to me. But such is life.

What Next, Then?

One of my core conclusions from this, despite how much I have tried to defy this my entire career as a game developer, is that folks pretty much just want strategy games from me/us. This is not all I want to do! I want to make games where you shoot things, and games where you're a raptor, and all sorts of other things! I have varied interests and tastes, and I don't want to do one thing for the rest of my life.

That said, given the choice between leaving the industry and making strategy games, the choice there is freaking obvious. I absolutely love making games, despite the many negative sides to it. So that's what we'll do: we'll make you another strategy game.

Specifically, we'll go back to the game that is still our top seller, AI War: Fleet Command, and we're going to do a proper updated sequel. But at this point I can't afford to do half a year or a year of development "on spec" to then find out if you're interested or not. So we'll likely run a Kickstarter for this, as much as I've avoided Kickstarters and never wanted to do one. And if that doesn't work out in a way that feels financially safe, then there are some other options on the table, too.

At any rate, people have been clamoring for this for years: an AI War sequel with a better UI, better performance, better networking, better graphics, moddability, and so on. We're now in a position where we know how to do all those things, and goodness knows we know how to make AI War better than we know how to make anything else under the sun. That's our freaking bread and butter right there.

I suppose there will be some people who are thinking "yay, end of the stupid raptor game, and we get the AI War sequel that has been quietly talked about for a year or so now!" And if that's how you feel, fine. But you were going to get that anyway, and I just wish that I also got to make this raptor game to go along with it.

Be Wary Of Knee-Jerk Reactions

It's very tempting for me to blame the state of the market, or whatever other external forces. Really it was a combination of things. So I have to be pretty careful of not giving in to negative emotions on my side.

On the other end, as an outside observer I hope that you also look at this for what it really is, and not the knee-jerk reaction that you might have. I am the Anti-Sean (cough). I will treat you fairly, communicate clearly and often, release frequent substantial updates (just look at our history), and try to over-deliver. This is what you want.

In an ideal world nobody ever makes a mistake. In the actual world, we have to think about how we want people to behave when mistakes inevitably do happen. I am sorry this had to happen, though. I wish it would magically change, but we're well past that point I think. I want to take a moment to thank everyone that did support the project, though -- it really meant a heck of a lot to me.

Very Best,

Chris

Click here for the official forum thread on this post.[www.arcengames.com]

In Case of Emergency, Release Raptor

52

54

Alpha 15 out for In Case of Emergency, Release Raptor!

25 Ağu 2016

Here are the release notes[arcengames.com]!

Okay, so first of all I want to apologize for not having the minimap in here or any new robots, which were things I'd said I was going to do today. We do have some new rooms for you, though, and some various tweaks and fixes to a number of other rooms.

The bulk of today's coding time was instead spent on refining the controls for the raptor and giving you some more options on tuning things there. This was probably the largest complaint about the content that is actually in the game at the moment. Some folks had some really good points about specific issues on reddit and the Steam forums, so I decided to switch gears and focus on those elements today rather than the minimap et al. Those will be tomorrow instead!

There are also some bugfixes in here, and some updates to add new goodies into the level editor. You can use those if you like (the level editor is part of the game), but mainly those are for Blue so that she can create some new goodies for you coming up. Cinth added some really awesome arches for ceilings that he modeled and got to a reasonable polycount with painstaking effort, so we're all quite pleased about these getting in there. He actually had those done late last week, and I just ran out of time to actually get them into the level editor palette.

Anyhow, so that's Day 1 of us actually having the game out. There will be another build tomorrow, and then most likely one on Sunday. Saturday is my son's 6th birthday party, so I'm going to be completely absent that day. In case you ever run into problems with a new build, I always put up a beta build calls "lastknowngood" in steam, so you can revert to that if a new build is temporarily causing you problems and I'm unavailable to fix it for whatever reason.

Thanks to everyone for their support and suggestions!

Chris

Click here for the official forum thread on this post.[www.arcengames.com]

In Case of Emergency, Release Raptor

0

13

In Case of Emergency, Release Raptor... well, released (Early Access).

24 Ağu 2016

https://youtu.be/2l4XISfQFbUSo... many... puns possible. I look forward to seeing what the press come up with (as long as it's not along the lines of No Man Buy, heh).

At any rate, today has been really hectic and I had to push the release back by one hour so that I could finish getting the video and screenshots up and everything. And that was even with Cinth doing basically everyone on the screenshots.

I really want to give a huge thanks to everyone who has been such a big help on this game: Blue, Keith, Cinth, Craig, Pablo, and Misery in particular. But there have been so many other people as well, including in particular garpu and jerith, and I'm sure I'm forgetting some folks, for which I apologize. And that's not even mentioning the recent raft of testers, who are all thanked on the release notes page[arcengames.com].

All righty. Speaking of release notes, I'm calling this first build for EA "Alpha 14," because it follows 13 pre-EA demos. That's on a new release notes page[arcengames.com] for during EA, since the pre-EA page was pretty darn huge by now.

Suffice it to say, the release notes for Alpha 14 itself are pretty pathetically thin. It's just been one of those days where a ton of other stuff sucked up the time; that shouldn't be the case tomorrow or the next day, since the big time-sinks today were store-related things and creating the above trailer and so on.

I was up super late last night, so I'm going to actually take off at 5pm today rather than working into the night. My son really really wants me to push him on the swings in about 10 minutes, too, so there's also that. He's really excited that this is out now, and that hopefully I won't need to be working weekends constantly again for a while. :)

Anyhow, I just wanted to say thank you again to everyone, and I hope you enjoy the game. And I'll have more updates for you tomorrow!

Best,Chris

Click here for the official forum thread on this post.[www.arcengames.com]

In Case of Emergency, Release Raptor

0

11

Pre-EA Demo 13 Out Now; EA Starts Tomorrow; Plus a Let’s Play!

23 Ağu 2016

Release Raptor Pre-EA Demo 13[arcengames.com] is now out for testers! Demo 12[arcengames.com] came out earlier today, so we've been busy.

Tomorrow is our release into Early Access, and while we haven't been able to do everything I had hoped by this point, we have done a lot of things that I hadn't expected to get to, so I guess it balances out. I'm really proud of the current state of the game, and it's going to grow rapidly over the next days -- not to mention weeks.

The performance of the procedurally generated levels is just on a whole other level compared to even earlier today, and I'm very excited about that. Visually I think it looks better, too, and that's only going to get better as I get more IES-based light cookies in there. Right now there are still some cases where we can get some ugly light bleed through walls thanks to changes made today, but that's relatively minor and something that we'll fix as we find them. I think all the most obvious cases have already been found, but we shall see.

In other news, I thought I'd share a series of screenshots from one of my test runs today. Note that I wasn't exactly playing strategically, I was more having a fun rampage, heh -- so I took a looot of hits.

I didn't take a screenshot from very early in my run, when I was at the airdrop site in the alley. However, this was the first hall in the first building I went into:

I continued around for a while and explored a few apartments, then went out into an alley between this building and the next. Cicadabots were... everywhere. RUN, FOOL!

I leapt up one fire escape and then wound my way up the other one using it as cover from their scouring attacks. I didn't bother destroying them much, because they don't shield Father Brain by being alerted. I think I did stop to leap off the fire escape and kill a couple of easy targets in them just because, though. ;)

In the next building I broke a lot of stuff and just kind of took out some aggression on a pair of apartments. There was a hole in the floor of one leading down into another, and what you see below is a lot of the wreckage left from my passage. Well, a little of it. ;)

Next up was another building on, getting into an industrial section next to these two apartment buildings. This giant room is meant to be a miniboss room, but we don't have any minibosses yet (sheepish grin). I was hoping to get one in today, but didn't have time because of all the other stuff that you see in those two release note lists.

THAT said, holy smokes the Cicadabots made it so that no miniboss was needed. That was unexpectedly intense (there were more than you can see in this one shot).

Unlike a regular miniboss, I didn't have to actually fight these (well, if I didn't sneak past the miniboss). But I chose to, just for fun (or spite?).

I can't express how badass I felt at the moment there looking around the room. I felt like a raptor had wandered into Portal and just wrecked everything.

I went through a few more industrial areas (no sewers in this particular run, it turned out), and then came into the lab at the end of the level. I was careless coming into the atrium of it, and a couple of Cicadabots jumped me.

I only took one hit, though! I freaked myself out a little bit, though, because after killing them their bodies were still there and kind of propped up, and I was paranoid that they were still alive. So I jumped on one and it kind of rolled around lifelessly, and I couldn't help but giggle a bit.

This is what Father Brain looks like when his shields are up. And I'm about to get blasted in the face trying to take a screenshot of it, naturally. There were turrets and yet more Cicadabots all up in here; fortunately no Beetleclefts hiding in the corner, though (or as Misery termed them, "those abominable green things.")

The shield is a really fun thing, because you can actually use it as a defense for yourself, too, heh. You can run up and down the big dome of it, and it blocks enemy shots. So you can hide on one side of the bubble, then pop over and get the enemies, etc. Father Brain taunts you mercilessly if you mess with his bubble too much, but still.

Yeah, so I got shot a LOT there. It was my own stupid fault, mostly from doing screenshots and not playing smart in general. I should have used the bubble more to my advantage. But now everyone else is dead except Father Brain and myself, and he's utterly defenseless.

You have to destroy the various parts of him in sequence (the five blue wires, then the five red wires, then the outer ring riser, then the outer glass, then the inner glass, then the core and you win). I made it extremely fun to do it quickly if you learn the sequence and run and smash as you go. I can get him down in under ten seconds, which just feels awesome because of all the explosions from him.

If you take it more slowly and everything isn't fire and death, then you can hear him call for help, beg, and try and trick you into leaving. I wrote those lines, but I remember when Ben and I were recording them I hit a point where we were both laughing with it and going "man that's DARK."

Actually the poor shield generator (not yet in the game) is way darker, but hey. When Craig was working on some of the audio for the shield generator, he said "is there a way I can not kill that guy and just have him be my buddy or something?" He won't be your buddy, but if you can avoid him and the things he's shielding, then you can at least spare him. (He never ASKED to be a shield generator. He's on your side! Etc. Those aren't the dark ones, obviously.)

Needless to say, this particular time I went for the kill with speed and couldn't even hear what Father Brain manged to get out before he went permanently offline. Another area secure! :D

---

And with that I'm going to close it out for the night, given that it's 2:30am.

Tomorrow morning I'm going to have to focus on getting a new trailer up as soon as possible, but Cinth is helping with taking new screenshots for the store, which I really appreciate. I want to get the minimap in there if at all possible after that, and then whatever other bugs pop up overnight, if they are blocking.

And then, aside from whatever new reports, it's on to more good stuff -- more enemies and locales and so on! I've enjoyed this polish pass, but we've had a lot of such passes (as the release notes show), and getting to focus on content more will be a nice change of pace. Fortunately Blue has been cranking out the locations to play in. She has this cool new rooftop scene that hopefully will be fully ready tomorrow; it's almost there as it is.

All right, goodnight. As you can tell, I'm in a good mood. :)

Cheers!

Chris

Click here for the official forum thread on this post.[www.arcengames.com]

In Case of Emergency, Release Raptor

0

13

Quick note: Pre-EA Demo 12 out.

23 Ağu 2016

Here are the release notes.[arcengames.com]

More coming tonight. Thanks to all the testers who are helping us with this! :)

In Case of Emergency, Release Raptor

0

11

Release Raptor Build For Testers Is Now Out!

22 Ağu 2016

Just a brief note now, to let folks that we are (roughly) on schedule for once. It took me about 8 hours longer than I expected, but it didn't push back into a further day, so that's good. ;)

For folks who are doing testing, there's a guide that I ask you read if you don't mind.

If you're curious about the release notes, those are here[arcengames.com].

Father Brain and procedural generation (procedural assembly?) are now in place, and that's the big news. Then lots of little annoying things were fixed up prior to putting in new testers, based on my own experiences and those of some of our other testers we already had.

And with that I'm going to close it out for the night. I'm going to be focusing tomorrow on getting the marketing materials and getting any release-blocker issues taken care of, plus getting a few quality of life things in there.

Then on Wednesday if the building isn't on fire then I can focus on more content. Blue will be focusing on more content tomorrow anyhow between fixing a few things anyway, so there will be new places to explore either way. :)

Enjoy a few more screenshots from a run of mine tonight. :)

Cheers!

Chris

Click here for the official forum thread on this post.[www.arcengames.com]

In Case of Emergency, Release Raptor

0

11

Tomorrow: Day of the Testers; Wednesday: Day of the Release

21 Ağu 2016

We have been very busy[arcengames.com]. That said, another minor delay. But! This time there is a huuuge silver lining if you just can't wait to get your hands on the game: you CAN get it tomorrow.

Wat?

The current delay is caused by a couple of things, but the need for adequate testing (even for an early access launch) is one of them. There were some severe performance issues in procgen-levels-only that I've ironed out in the past day, and that set me back. It also made me really antsy about wanting more eyeballs on this before we start selling it.

You Can Get A Copy, Tomorrow

So! If you're interested in testing the game, please send an email to arcengames at gmail dot com, and we'll provide a limited number of people copies of the game based on our best guess as to who will give us actual testing feedback based on how they present themselves.

This does mean that you'll get a free copy of the game that will continue to work after we release it. Free stuff, yay!

But, as we've done in the past with testers on other games of ours, our one request is that you do a good-faith effort to actually not just play the game, but also report any bugs or issues you find. Instructions one how to do that will be provided via email, but it's basically just mantis bugtracker reports[www.arcengames.com].

Despite one person having a crash in a video today, I'm pretty confident in the demo levels at this point (they are limited in scope and have been beat to heck and back by press and a few testers we do have and of course our staff). The procgen stuff is a lot more voluminous and has had far fewer eyeballs on it, which is my core concern.

Streamers Get A Copy Tomorrow, Too

We've been hesitating on reaching out to twitch streamers until the procgen stuff is in place, because that's what is needed for them to really be able to do longer-term streaming. That will be ready enough tomorrow, although I shudder to think that some of them may run into some issues like being able to find a hole in a room and jump out of the level and get infinite falling death, or find some other issue that we just need to spend 5 minutes on to fix once we (or someone else) find it.

Having press/streamers and QA running simultaneously is not the ideal, but doing that AND having a launch at the same time is straight-up stupid if you have any alternative. So if you're a streamer and you run into a problem, please let us know if you will, and give us a little extra slack for just two days. ;)

Full Release Into EA On Wednesday The 21st

This last delay will give us a few things:

I'll have time to do a last trailer and screenshot set that best represent the game on the storefronts.

We'll have time for more press and streamers to get in there and do previews so that potential customers can be more informed on launch.

We'll be able to run an intensive last cycle of pre-EA testing with more testers than we currently have, and thus have a smoother launch from that angle, too.

If I happen to have spare time on my hands (haha), then I can throw in a few extra goodies for the launch. Otherwise those can come the day after launch.

Last Note

I know that all these delays have been really frustrating to folks, and may have looked unprofessional in some respects. I've spoken on the Arcen forums on this subject at some length, but basically I've been caught between competing "challenges" for a while now.

Ultimately I've chosen to continue to do what is in the best interest of the launch of the game, even if that means a later launch, and I think that you'll appreciate that when you get the launch version. And then hopefully that will transition well into us making more content very quickly after launch, too, to further reinforce the forward momentum we're picking up at this point.

Anyway, so I apologize about the rollercoaster this has been. Hopefully if you're invested enough into the idea of this game that this has been a big frustration for you, you won't mind getting a free copy in exchange for some early testing. We can't give out a thousand copies of the game in that way, but having a few dozen extra sets of eyeballs would be a really good thing as a last sanity-check.

Thanks as always for reading, and for your support!

Chris

Click here for the official forum thread on this post.[www.arcengames.com]

In Case of Emergency, Release Raptor

4

13

The Last "Two-Level Demo" For Release Raptor!

20 Ağu 2016

...and I just realized I forgot to update the main menu text to reflect that. Bah! Always something. ;)

Well, as you can see from the release notes[arcengames.com], we're getting darn close to being ready.

We have a variety of new enemies (though there are lots more coming -- it was hard to tear myself away from making more right away, because it is super fun to do).

The voice acting for the robots is now in place, for those robots that are in place thus far. We took note from Bionic Dues and have been sure to have a really huge amount of voice cues for every robot so that they don't get too repetitive. There are also a larger number of less-funny ones in there so that it's not too funny all the time, which gets tiring when that's the case.

Among the new robots, we have our first flying robots, our first robots that divide, and the first ones that use ballistic trajectory shots.

The procedural map generation code is now done, thanks to Keith. There are likely still some glitches with it, but this is based around hand-crafted content being procedurally assembled, so that does help. The system is really powerful and lets me design level flows with a really high degree of specifity so that the layout makes sense.

The occlusion system has had a huge revamp as well, to aid in performance in general, and to prep for the procgen levels. This is the major thing holding back procgen levels at the moment.

Father Brain and the level flow that surrounds him has also not been implemented yet, and that's another key part of the feel of procgen levels. He's actually one of the easier robots, though, so that's good. And the stealth bits that play into his main mechanic have been done for a while.

So, are we on schedule for our release to EA on Monday?

At the moment I'd have to say... yes! There are some things I still have to get worked out over the weekend, to be sure, mainly to do with the occlusion system. But my hope is to have the procgen levels in the hands of press and testers tomorrow (well, today; it's 3am). Anyhow, Saturday sometime.

Beyond that it will then be a focus on more content, and continual polish in general. It looks like we're getting really well situated for me to be able to focus on content (in the form of enemies and game mechanics) next week; and Blue has been focusing on content in the form of level design for quite some time now (and it really shows). I'm definitely excited about the build you'll have at launch!

Click here for the official forum thread on this post.[www.arcengames.com]